I am delighted to announce that Springer has released a new book Experiential Walks for Urban Design: Revealing, Representing, and Activating the Sensory Environment, edited by Barbara E. A. Piga, Daniel Siret and Jean-Paul Thibaud.
Tassia Joannides and I have a chapter included in the book, titled ‘Urban Flâneur: A Site-Responsive Walking Methodology for Fashion Design‘, as part of a section on Experiential Walk for Informing Urban Design and Favoring Citizens’ Engagement.
You can read the ABSTRACT for the chapter here:
Walking is fundamental to how we occupy and navigate our world. Our streets are populated by walking, dressed bodies yet the role of walking has been largely overlooked by the field of fashion design. This chapter examines how fashion can play a role in producing experiences and understandings between (dressed) social bodies and urban environments. Firstly, it proposes that walking the city is a critical activity for fashion practice that can be utilised by creative practitioners to build embodied and situated knowledges of place through a methodology of ‘urban flâneurie’. Secondly, it demonstrates how a critically reflective approach to walking can enhance how fashion presentations—such as runways and public events—contribute to place-making through engagement with urban environments. These concepts are explored through a case study of a site-responsive fashion project in Victoria Harbour, Australia, entitled Urban Flâneur, which resulted in two creative public events. Here, walking becomes a method for fashion designers to study complex relationships arising between fashion, culture and place, and to produce outcomes that activate the urban site.
ABOUT THIS BOOK:
“The edited volume explores the topic of experiential walks, which is the practice of multi- or mono-sensory and in-motion immersion into an urban or natural environment. The act of walking is hence intended as a process of (re-)discovering, reflecting and learning through an embodied experience. Specific attention is devoted to the investigation of the ambiance of places and its dynamic atmospheric perception that contribute to generating the social experience. This topic is gaining increasing attention and has been studied in several forms in different disciplines to investigate the particular spatial, social, sensory and atmospheric character of places.
The book contains chapters by experts in the field and covers both the theory and the practice of innovative methods, techniques, and technologies. It examines experiential walks in the perspective of an interdisciplinary approach to environmental and sensory urban design by organising the contributions according to three specific interrelated focuses, namely the exploration and investigation of the multisensory dimension of public spaces, the different ways to grasp and communicate the in-motion experience through traditional and novel forms of representation, and the application of the approach to urban participatory planning and higher education. Shedding new light on the topic, the book offers both a reference guide for those engaged in applied research, and a toolkit for professionals and students.”
PURCHASE is available through the publisher here: SPRINGER
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